Computer Science Researcher

This week, research and the future

It’s been awhile since I’ve written anything for this site. A lot has changed since then, which has caused my outlook for this site to change as well. From now on I will be writing research based brief summaries of topics in the computer science research field. More specifically, subjects I have been studying outside my degree studies. I’m really enthusiastic about this and I am aiming to write a weekly post exploring a subject, as well as small one off general software engineering or technology posts. I love working in the research field and trying to push the frontiers of science forward and I hope this site will help reflect that enterprise.

I am studding a bachelor degree in Computer Science, as well as working as an assistant researcher for the Computer Science department at Hull University in the UK. It is an amazing department, filled with exceptional leadership, researchers and lectures. From what started as a 6 week summer internship researching mobile technology, especially related to android development, has developed into an extended research assistant internship for my full second year of my degree. It’s a magnificent place to work and I feel exceptionally lucky to be working alongside incredibly intelligent and talented people. Sometime I can’t believe that I get paid to do something that I really enjoy.

This week I have been a part of Hull Universities Science Fair. This involved presenting various pieces of equipment to school children and parents from 7am-4pm over the course of two days. I presented custom demo’s for the Oculus rift that the research department had made. Their aim was to research teaching people how to operate in a dangerous environment through virtual reality. Furthermore, I also presented the Lego mind-storm robots. These are quite cool pieces of equipment. Even though they are a children’s toy, they are fully programmable. This allows us, as software engineers, to rapidly prototype robots for different domains, and focus most of our time on the software that runs them. The research group (CSRG) I am a part of ended up making a fully programmable Turing machine out of the Lego mind-storm. Which I think is amazing.